1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to software, and more specifically to systems and methods involving meta-objects or metadata.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software coding generally includes techniques and tools for following a standard software development life cycle (SDLC) methodology and associated workflow model. Software application designers following the current SDLC workflow model are exposed to a number of inherent limitations that become problematic when attempting to efficiently develop applications. For example, in order to promote new code to the production server, the production server must be removed from service, or in other words the currently running software release is shut down in order to overwrite or update the application with new files.
This can become further problematic when a newly deployed production application must be “rolled back” to the previous version. By adhering to the requirement to keep versions separate, application providers are limited to operating and executing only one configuration of the application in a single instance. Binary code is frequently modified within multiple different application instances. Application providers must deploy multiple different hardware stacks to support concurrent execution of different release and version levels. Each time a change, modification, or feature enhancement is introduced, a separate build process involving a complete recompilation of the entire application under construction is required.
In light of the above, it would be desirable to simplify the complexities found in today's software application development environments.